The Emerging Writers’ Festival returns this September 5 to 15 with a special spring edition, featuring a stellar program of performances, workshops and a closing night banquet.
Ruby-Rose Pivet Marsh, Artistic Director of Emerging Writers’ Festival, is no stranger to navigating creative communities. “I’ve been writing, doing freelance music journalism since I was a teenager,” Ruby says. “But the last time I was consistently writing would’ve been for Beat.” They laugh, acknowledging the full-circle moment.
These days, between co-founding and co-directing an arts collective for Latinx artists called Yo Soy, running a quarterly writing group, facilitating professional and creative development programs, as well as heading up the Emerging Writers’ Festival team in the role of Artistic Director, Ruby admits that working on EWF so closely “reminds me to take space for my own work.”
Emerging Writers’ Festival
- September 5 to 15
- Venues across Melbourne
- Full program here
Explore Melbourne’s latest arts and stage news, features, festivals, interviews and reviews here.
“My main focus is generally the festival and making opportunities for other writers to come together,” Ruby says about their work. EWF works to provide valuable spaces for writers and creatives to gather and connect, “and I think that that’s a pretty rare space,” Ruby adds.
“Generally speaking, I think that need for that space is kind of forgotten about,” Ruby explains. “Like, of course you need somewhere for community and writers to learn from each other, because that’s how you’re going to get to the point of a healthy literary ecosystem and all of those kinds of things. You can’t really do that without making the space for people.”
Emerging Writers’ Festival
If these spaces didn’t exist before, the Emerging Writers’ Festival has certainly created them. This year’s festival – held in spring for the first time – explores themes of growth, divinations and ethereal dreamscapes. Ruby reveals that this year’s program has been over a year in the making. “We started on it about a year ago, probably just before the last festival,” they say. “Part of that is because you have all these ideas and you can’t fit them all into one festival.”
After an artist callout – something that Ruby says, “truly shapes the festival; I think it’s what makes EWF unique” – the team received an overwhelming response of pitches that were “rich with incredible ideas that were working with the themes that we were already investigating”.
Opening Night: LIB[ERA]TION
The festival opens with LIB[ERA]TION, curated by EWF Guest Curator Mackenzie Lee, where emerging First Nations artists will speak and share about writing as a tool for liberation. Later in the festival, what was once the EWF writer’s night school has transformed into a salon of sorts. “We wanted to expand things to be a bit more community focused,” Ruby says. “This is your space to discuss rather than to be talked at.”
EWF Writers’ Salon
In Ruby’s final year as EWF Artistic Director, Ruby has made sure that this year’s festival program includes only the crème de la crème of events. A highlight, Ruby points out, is the multimodal event Trick of Light on September 10. Ruby says, “is a mix of readings and performances and then some kind of more visual performances. [They’re] artists who are using light as part of their reading.”
Another standout for Ruby is Body Curious on September 14, where “different kinds of performers and writers who look at the way that your body experiences the world in terms of sense, and how to use that in writing.”
But the event Ruby is most looking forward to at this year’s EWF? The Closing Night’s ethereal spring banquet party, of course. A bit “Saltburn”, a bit “goth”, a bit “Midsummer’s Night Dream”, attendees are invited to come dressed in theme to Chapter House on September 15 for a dreamlike feast, catered by Lara Chamas, to close out what promises to be an incredible festival.
Closing Night: BANQUET
“I really like the idea of everyone sharing a table, rather than there being a separation between the artist and the audience,” Ruby says about the Banquet set-up. “EWF is made up of the artists, who are also the audience, and that’s always been the case. We are for and by emerging writers, and that’s also who’s in the festival and who’s coming to the event.”
“So, it kind of makes sense to have an event where we accumulate at the end of the festival and it’s really clear and strong that people are coming together for that reason and that’s what links them all, even if they’re all working across completely different sort of forms and genres and themes.” By emerging artists, for emerging artists, and everyone in between – you wouldn’t want to miss out on this year’s EWF.
You can check out the full program for the Emerging Writers’ Festival here.
This article was made in partnership with Emerging Writers’ Festival.
